In this letter, we suggest a noise estimation method which can be applied for speech enhancement in various noise environments. The proposed method consists of the following two main processes to analyze and estimate efficiently the noise from the noisy speech. First, a least-squares line is used, which is obtained by applying coefficient magnitudes in node with a uniform wavelet packet transform to a least squares method. Next, a differential forgetting factor and a correlation coefficient per subband are applied, where each subband consists of several nodes with the uniform wavelet packet transform. In particular, this approach has the ability to update noise estimation by using the estimated noise at the previous frame only instead of employing the statistical information of long past frames and explicit nonspeech frames detection consisted of noise signals. In objective assessments, we observed that the performance of the proposed method was better than that of the compared methods. Furthermore, our method showed a reliable result even at low SNR.

A speech enhancement method is proposed that can be implemented efficiently due to its use of wavelet packet transform. The proposed method uses a modified spectral subtraction with noise estimation by a least-squares line method and with an overweighting gain per subband with nonlinear structure, where the overweighting gain is used for suppressing the residue of musical noise and the subband is used for applying the weighted values according to the change of signals. The enhanced speech by our method has the following properties: 1) the speech intelligibility can be assured reliably; 2) the musical noise can be reduced efficiently. Various assessments confirmed that the performance of the proposed method was better than that of the compared methods in various noise-level conditions. Especially, the proposed method showed good results even at low SNR.